Andrew Lincoln has heard your complaints about The Walking Dead‘s seventh season. It’s too violent, too morbid, too “painful.” But in a new interview, he promised that the season’s back-half, which premieres on AMC on February 12, will be “probably the opposite of what you just witnessed.”
Lincoln understands why some viewers were put off by the first episodes of season seven, and he nearly felt the same way. Until, that is, showrunner Scott M. Gimple explained something to him. “Rather than just have a very cool exciting buildup to war between between Negan and Rick,” he told Entertainment Weekly, “he wanted people to want more than that — to really feel that they wanted justice, and then to also acknowledge the cost of what had happened and why they were willing to risk it all again while realizing that they were putting many, many, many lives back in the firing line.” I think people understood that after the premiere, when Glenn and Abraham’s heads were smashed in, which was decidedly not “cool” or exciting,” but alas.
After saying that The Walking Dead is telling a “very brave, bold, and also challenging story,” Lincoln added, “People are absolutely entitled to feeling exactly what they want to feel about the show, and it’s interesting the way that people view it differently now… Although I would say that this season made a lot more sense once we got the last role of film in the can for episode 716. The brilliant writers that we have take some risks, and I admire them for it. I admire anybody taking risks.” Especially if (when?) they involve gun fights?
(Via Entertainment Weekly)
